


Heartrend

by cliffracerx



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Genre: Feels bad man, M/M, Sad, cliffy ruins everything, fairytale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-21 22:11:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16585187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cliffracerx/pseuds/cliffracerx
Summary: A sad and enigmatic tale concerning the fate of a ruling king and a God that loves him.





	Heartrend

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NeoQwerty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoQwerty/gifts).



> -My friend and I were discussing really neat (and some mundane) headcanons. I ended up writing this mishmash of events from my main verse (OMaS) and their HCs in the form a weird fairytale. It's positively peppered with references to in-game stuff, which I've left as easter eggs for readers to find!  
> -Obviously, Voryn/Dagoth Ur = God and Nerevar = The prince.  
> -Poor voryn. he wanted snuggles. what he got instead were struggles :<

God lavished numerous praises upon the prince's name. It was well within his wont to drone on for hours, expressing his numinous love by singing incongruous poetry to a storm. Adorned by the weight of God's love and his purpose, the storms were sent forth (most often to find the prince), and with them came those who hearkened to his great call. Somehow, these poor storms never did reach him. The trouble was that both God’s love and his presence were eternal, and the prince’s, he feared, were protean.

Still, the prince was once a ruling king--and if he was npt, then he would be so again, soon. Crowed by a veil of mist, dawn and dusk flowed through his veins like fine wine. The rose-red mistress from beyond the veil had marked his brow with the celestial bodies that indicative of the evening's chill, inadvertently assisting God in his ceaseless search. God had sailed over screaming seas of time and bone to find him.

Confused and bereft of their purpose after wandering too far from God and his mountain, the storms he made (and the armies by which they were accompanied) sometimes made mistakes, and so God became an icon of abhorrence in his own land. Weakness, he knew, was ruled by superstition--and those who gave way to its governance readily affixed his name to evil, naming him a devil and a thing of the past. However, it was by no fault of his that people chose to be affeared and naive.

Each time he heard God's song, the prince wept and cried, “Do not sing to me so, for I do not know you!”

His cries splintered God’s dreams and sundered time, just as they had long ago. At long last, the bitter war of attrition was ended when God finally managed to trace the prince’s location to the island of Gorne. Until then, he'd found the prince only when he dreamt. Long had he haunted the other with his cataclysmic golden visage. On one such evening, he called out to the prince in excitement, only to be met with the same bitter response as before.

God's sweet call rose above the melody in the prince's mind like the inevitable tide. “My lord, will you not come to me?”

The prince's ears pricked, for he had again heard God's call. “Do not beseech me, for I do not know you,” he insisted, adding another fissure to God's heart.

And so God descended upon the island, seeking his prince. The people fled in fear at his visage, rendered in fiery gold, ash, and blood. Some say that those unable to behold his might ceased to be.

One flame born repeatedly in the wind, never flickering despite the gawing, arrogant ferocity of the storm that constantly enveloped him, a solitary swordsmer--pale, serene and contemplative--continued his vigil over the courtyard of House Sandil, his gait apparently augmented with the same boyish insouciance of any other youth of his caliber. The giant, invisible hands of Padomay served as the unsuspecting bastion which protected the flame from being snuffed out too soon before returning, once more, to guide the way of all things.

Surrounded by the ordered tranquility one might expect of an Indoril garden (in which all things were trimmed by Threes), the prince looked on with watchful, piercing eyes whose undersides were crested with weariness, for they often bore witness to God dancing at the core while he slept. God called out to him, once more; out to the one whom he swore to be his husband. The prince denied him yet again, fervently shaking his head. However, God was good and patient, just as he'd been in days long before he'd become God. He caressed his prince's hand lovingly, explaining that he took the prince in death long ago and wed him beneath the mountain. Death, it seemed, would have neither of them and was perfectly content to see them united--at least, as far as God was concerned.

Although he knew that God longed for him, he knew also that a ruling king belonged only to himself. Despite his beloved's outward refusal, God was really no stranger to the prince and was quite wary of his ever-shifting ways. He was an ornery, stubborn thing by nature who fancied that he could not be owned by God or anything at all.

God knew him by his face and the gleaming sigil crowning his brow. “My lord,” echoed God's cries upon the winds in the form of a song as his wishing presence stood there before the prince. “Will you not come with me?”

The swordsmer-prince wrenched away from God with one abducent, tempestuous gesture. “Horror. _Fright!_ **_Begone!!”_** He cried, refusing to look God in the eyes--of which there were three. Once more, God became disconsolate by his lover's refusal. He was thoroughly perplexed by its adamance (of which he would make little sense), for the prince cried out for him in his dreams every night. Nevertheless, the bitter river rejection paved paths of truth upon the surface of the waking world.

God and his faithful legions vanished from the island just as quickly as they had arrived. Nobody could recall that they'd come at all, except for the prince, who knew well the one who haunted his nightmares. Howbeit, the prince’s umpteenth rejection would not deter God from his own monumental goal, into which he poured burning and incalculable sums of effort.

In the dead of night, God used his power to lure the prince out of his sleep and toward an ancient cavern on the island, in which all the woes and grievous misdeeds of the prince's kin had been concealed, where they lay forgotten for centuries. Within that chamber were a set of God's bells, which produced a song that could be heard clearly by any who dared to ring them. All but the prince risked God's wrath in doing so--God's wrath, which came most often in the form of withering, weeping death.

Embittered, God spun a curse in his song, recalling that the prince slew him long ago. The prince’s rejection, his dishonesty, forgetfulness mingled with God’s confusion, God’s pain, and the screaming wraith of murder that eternally poisoned God’s bloody heart. God could foresee many things, as he was mighty and wise, yet could not see the Black-Hands widow weaving her gossamer-thin poison web of intrigue all over his deeds.

The baneful melody soon drove the prince to madness, inciting him to slay his kin, who came seeking him in his absence. 

Unperturbed by the bloodshed (for he marked well the horrors of war), the image of the prince lived on in God's mind, immaculate and unsullied; rendered in sunsweet golden tones. God was eager to see him restored.

His prince, who came again and again, was doomed to wander the world wearing inconsistent faces until he mastered his own way. He died as he lived, born and reborn countless times over. Within his fiery bastion, God pondered this, realizing that it was this wretched Cycle that had forced the prince's hand against him, and robbed him of their memories together.

Before God could call out to him, the mannish dogs of Cyrodiil stole his prince away. God stretched his sight as far as it might extend, but he saw nothing. For many nights his searching and scrying proved fruitless until at last, he had a vision of the prince, beaten and shackled, boarding a ship bound for God's own land. Though he was aggrieved to see his lover in such straits (for chains, he felt, did not suit the prince) God's aching patience was soothed by the balm of knowledge.

The prince arrived anon in God’s land, where he would toil, mistreated, for many moons to relearn his old strength and claim all that was lost to him. God watched him from afar, and had by now decided to change his approach. The prince had told him in a dream that he was unworthy, fueling God's newfound resolve to test him. Doubt was swift to cast its ugly, misshapen shadow over God, leaving yet another crack upon his heart.

As night is the blackened agent of change unanticipated, the prince found himself set upon by assassins, who gave their lives willingly for the sake of testing the prince at God’s behest. The prince slew them all before returning to his labors, content, for now, to remain obscured from God and his discerning eye.

Ere long, the prince made himself known to God yet again--or so he fancied. God, meanwhile, had been watching him closely the entire time, though he was far too proud to admit this. God sent forth legions of those most faithful to him to escort the prince. When the prince and legions met, God posed the question once more: “My lord, my love, my only! Will you come to me now?” In his voice was betrayed a hint of God’s humanity, which he’d attempted to shed long ago. The prince pitied him, remembering the love he had for God, which had slumbered in the corners of his heart up until recently.

“I will,” came the prince’s solemn reply. “You have my oath, for whatever it may be worth to you.”

The prince marched to the mountain, seeking God beneath. The prince frowned as he marked God's followers and was unnerved as to how their ashen forms writhed like serpents from the unknown maybe. “This is blight,” said he.

“This is my love, and my House,” God replied in earnest. He was patient and had saved a seat for the prince.

So it was that the shaded Trickster came to the Time-Dragon under the pretense of peacemaking and friendship. The crafty prince expressed his desire to earn back some semblance of God's respect by challenging his brothers to a duel before entering his service. God chuckled outwardly at the prince's eagerness, though he feared for the prince's welfare internally, for God's brothers, like him, had grown immensely powerful over time.

With all the respect due to those who were kin to a god, the prince issued his challenges to each of God’s brothers, who were equal parts polite and unperturbed by this. They bore him no ill will, believing themselves immortal and therefore unable to know true harm at the prince’s hand. In succession, the prince overcame the brute strength and magickal might of God’s brothers, prying from their forms the secrets that seeped forth from the wounds in the land; for he’d made it his will to know just what it was that made God’s heart beat.

These profane secrets sang songs of war and steel, assuming the form of weapons in the prince's hands, which were weapons unto themselves.

Armed with these secrets and mantled in sword-singing knowledge of the walking ways that even God himself could not fathom, the prince confronted God, calling him once more by his mortal name. When the prince looked long into the God’s eyes he was unafraid, and a thunder came between them. God steeled himself, hardening his brittle heart as he prepared for battle. All the while, the ichorous taste of vengeance he'd woven with his barbed, venomous curse soured upon his tongue.

Suddenly, the prince cast down his weapons, seizing God's mask and casting it aside before pressing his lips against God's fanged mouth. In that moment, God's heart fractured yet again; his purpose leeching from within him as he and his prince exchanged breaths. All along, God had guarded the prince's own power inside him fiercely, waiting for the day that he would come to claim it. However, in his agony, God had forgotten this, long ago scattering this truth to the winds.

The mirror shattered as God's heart broke utterly, erasing all the withered things he'd created according to his own twisted image of love. He ceased to be as he was, leaving a small portion of himself within the prince for all time--the prince, who had just been crowned a ruling king.


End file.
